Strippin'

There has been pretty good progress on the canoe as of late, with Sarah gone (she's on a "work" related travel assignment in Barcelona...I don't know how much work they're really doing) and no one else to entertain me (except the occasional visit by Ben, Cat and Cara) I've been hard at work. School related work is pretty much like this: add 2mL of nitric acid, wait 12 hours, add 2 more mL of nitric acid, wait 12 hours, add 3mL hydrochloric acid, wait 12 hours. So, in my down-time I've been working on a geologic map of my thesis area and building a canoe as well as coffee table. The stripping of the canoe has been pretty fun. The strips are 7/32" thick by 3/4" wide by roughly 10 feet long. The canoe is about 18 feet, so, I have to join the strips to make them long enough. Once strips reach the top of the stems you can only add strips to one side of the canoe at a time, working towards the centerline. I'm nearly at the centerline on one side!

Milling Strips on the bandsaw. I cut the strips from rough 2x6 western red cedar. First I re-sawed the 2x6's to 1x6's then cut each 1x6 into 1/4" strips. Each 1x6 yielded 22 strips. This is A LOT of cutting and I chose to do it on a bandsaw mainly because of safety. Some would argue that you waste less wood on a bandsaw because the blade kerf (thickness of the blade) is about 1/4 the thickness of a circular saw blade. However, the bandsaw makes a rather rough cut, so the strips must be planed - which adds time and waste. All in all I probably wasted about the same amount of wood as I would have on the table saw, but it was safer, and the strips more uniform after planing, than the table saw would have yielded. Thanks to Ben Belgarde for buying a planer that I'm still the only one to use!

Clamp thingy workin' good!

First three strips completed. This is why I needed all those clamps Cindy! Thanks!

Gettin' close to that centerline!

This final picture is the status of the canoe as it sits today!